Emax II operation manual
199
BUT I’VE RUN OUT OF DDLS!
You’ve got one DDL chorusing the lead vocal, one on the drum overhead mic, and your
very last DDL doubling a sax solo. At this point the rhythm guitarist muses about how
it would be nice to have a little eighth-note slapback every time he hits that fancy B maj
7th chord...you know, a tail of about three or four echoes that fade out nicely into the
drum fill.
Here’s where velocity keyboards come in handy. Sample the rhythm guitarist’s fancy
chord, and play the sample when the echo is supposed to come in. Play it once for each
echo, and play the note a little softer each time so that the echo’s level diminishes
properly. If you have an open track, the echo can be recorded there and you won’t have
to think about it any more. If all your tracks are full, find someone to play the part in real
time during the mix itself.
I must confess to using this technique a lot, even when I haven’t run out of DDLs, since
it allows for echo effects that would be just about impossible to achieve with standard
DDLs (such as strange polyrhythms, echoes that get louder and then softer, and so on).
TESTING, TESTING...
And since we’re in a mix-oriented frame of mind, we want to make sure everything is
aligned level-wise. Sample a 100 Hz, 1 kHz, and 10 kHz tone into the sampler; they won’t
take up much memory since all you have to do is loop a few cycles. Then make up a little
sequence that spits out these tones in the right order for calibration. Some samplers will
have a hard time dealing with a 10 kHz signal, but if you sample at a fast sample rate and
sample the tones at a moderate level, you should have something good enough to use.
Keyboard players who would like to endear themselves to guitarists can sample an E =
164.8 Hz tone into the sampler. When transposed down an octave, this produces the right
frequency for tuning the guitar’s low E string. When transposed up an octave, you can
tune the high E. Notes for the other guitar strings (A, D, G, B) lie within this two-octave
range. You can even make up a little tuning sequence—say, 10 seconds on each note
needed for tuning.
AND THERE’S MORE!
While technically not a fix-it-in-the-mix application, some samplers [Emax II, ed.] let you
slow the sampling rate way down, thus allowing very long sampling times. This can be
a real boon to songwriters. I don’t know about you, but I often come up with words by
playing a chorus or verse over and over and over again until I’ve got most of the words
filled in. In the Dark Ages, this meant rewinding your tape a lot. Now TASCAM, Fostex,
and others offer “block repeat” functions where the tape will rewind back to a set point,
play forward to another set point, rewind, play, and so on. But why torture your tape
deck transport? Sample the entire verse, chorus, or whatever, and loop it.
FIX IT IN THE MIX
Fixitinthemix
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